Every few days, I post musings, ideas, quotes, and mini-essays on writing, painting, and the creative process. I'm a professional freelance editor, pastellist, and novelist. I believe in supporting the creativity of all of us.

Friday, October 1, 2010

breaking my commitment

Over the last several months, I've tried to be really good at keeping my commitment to write every Writing Friday, the day that writer friends come to spend the day writing and talking about writing. I didn' thave Writing Friday last week because I was in San Diego speaking at a conference and selling my memoir.

Unfortunately for my schedule, I took off all four days of the trip rather than doing some work projects while I was there. I had a great mini-vacation but I came back to a slam load of editing work in my paid profession. I worked as hard as I could this week, but rush projects kept coming in and I kept saying yes and this morning I found myself really conflicted. Did I write at Writing Friday or did I move three other paid projects along so I wouldn't have to work all weekend and have a hellatious next week to boot?

I opted to reduce the stress by working today. But I also had to wonder about a secondary motivation. Sometimes I am reluctant to sit down to Writing Friday if I don't quite know where the story is going although almost always something appears if I get to it. And that wasn't the problem today as I know what comes next in the book.

However, I don't know what comes after that. My two parallel stories are about to merge and I am currently clueless as to the rest of the plot. Maybe I didn't want to sit deep in not knowing all this next week. As it is now, I still have that already thought-up chapter to work on next Friday. Ah, the games we play with ourselves.